When one is ill, one goes to the doctor for tests to be done.

The tests are not a cure for what ails you. A test is simply a diagnostic tool. After the test, some protocol (a change in diet, lifestyle, medication, or even surgical intervention) needs to be undertaken in the hope of alleviating the symptoms.

We would never assume that a test cures the disease it diagnoses.

Except, that is, in the field of education. Politicians and bureaucrats tend to invoke a mantra of accountability buzzwords to address our concerns about academic achievement as though fear and trepidation about new assessments will somehow magically inspire all our young people to achieve at heretofore-unimagined levels. However, if students are not getting motivated for tests and quizzes administered by their teachers, with whom they have a personal relationship in the classroom, what makes a politician or bureaucrat think that these students will suddenly find their motivation to excel on a one-size-fits-all test written by strangers?

This is but an introduction to a perplexing conundrum.

Mention standardized testing in a room full of teachers and the reaction is quite likely to be visceral. Many teachers have come to mistrust the motives of those who mandate tests and to question the competency of the psychometricians who create them, and at times, yes, even to doubt the relevancy of what is being measured.

Many teachers contend that this rage for standardized testing is not really about improving education. Improving education would mean decreasing class size, paying teachers competitive salaries and supplying those teachers with adequate resources. Mandating tests is more about appeasing the three-quarters of the electorate that does not have school-age children with the “appearance” of doing something to improve education.

Furthermore, teachers are growing weary of threats of further “accountability”  (read that: punishing schools and teachers that fail to raise test scores) while being systematically denied adequate resources and working conditions necessary to perform the task. We may as well adopt a policy that punishes employees for falling ill as a result of their employer placing them in unhealthy working conditions.

It is certainly not that teachers are against tests per se. Teachers, this writer included, have been known to administer rigorous exams. One colleague said a while back, “If I thought testing would improve my students’ performance, I’d give them a test every day.” But “standardized” tests will not improve educational outcomes. Improved instruction in scenarios more conducive to learning will.

What follows is a cautionary yarn about the outcomes of high-stakes testing. Let’s play a game called “So Who Wants to Get Into Graduate School?” Here is an actual question from an actual diagnostic exam administered at a local four-year institution. It is in the form of an analogy.

“Too” is to “Loose” as “Low” is to:
A) Also
B) Tight
C) High
D) Trek

How many otherwise exceptionally talented people might be denied access to higher education because they were unable to make the necessary link to Nineteenth Century French Impressionism and the painter Toulouse Lautrec, or some other set of equally trivial factoids? Granted, this is but one egregious example of cultural bias in the world of “Gotcha!” testing, but it may be the subtle, less-transparent biases that are truly the more dangerous.

Admittedly, no test will ever be perfectly unbiased. The very act of choosing a topic to be questioned is a form of bias. But many tests are not even close to being adequately screened for cultural bias.

For example, this writer sat for the French section of the National Teacher’s Exam in 1986. Not one mention was ever made of Rabelais, Montaigne, Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, Rousseau, Baudelaire, Zola, Sartre or Camus; all of whom were on the required reading list for a Master of Arts in French Literature. No, at the height of the Political Correctness craze, every selection was from authors relegated to the “the supplementary reading list” such as Colette, Sand, Duras, Senghor and Dadié, undeniably wonderful authors all, but hardly the mainstays of French Culture and Civilization and certainly not the primary focus of my instructional program.

A good score did not prevent me from being perturbed that the test writers were more interested in punishing the test takers for what they had not studied than in rewarding them for what they had mastered. One is reminded of a quote from Charles Colton “…the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.”

Still, increasing awareness of bias and poor test design has resulted in significant improvements in our mass assessments. There is still a long way to go, but we appear headed in the right direction.

Of more concern to those involved in Public Education is the leaching of resources from classrooms by those fixated on the assessment of academic accomplishments.

First, these tests cost money. Standardized tests are, in fact, cash cows for the companies who design and grade them. Regrettably, for all this money we spend on these tests, the testing companies only tell us what we have, or have not, accomplished. A doctor does not just tell you that you are sick; he tells you how to get better. Unlike your doctor who tells you what you need to do to improve your health, the testing companies are not forthcoming about what classroom practices will facilitate improved cognitive development. What is garnered from all these millions funneled into standardized assessments?

The principal by-products remain finger pointing and blame-game scenarios.

While many teachers place their hard-earned dollars on the counter to buy such staples as pencils, papers and other supplies for their classrooms, the state mandates and funds standardized tests to the tune of millions of dollars. How many teachers, aides and counselors are sacrificed in the name of testing? How many textbooks, audio-visual supplies and computers are line item vetoed to pay for the design, administration and grading of standardized tests? Tests that in no way increase the yield of academic outcomes.

Second, testing has become a drain on the already overloaded educational calendar. We keep increasing the number of tasks our schools are to accomplish, but the number of hours in a school year has been virtually constant for over a century. Welcome to your neighborhood “Standardized Test Administration Center”!

While teachers contribute countless hours beyond the “contractual” day just to keep things running, they see their instructional program disrupted for days, and sometimes weeks, as they themselves become over-qualified test proctors instead of just underpaid teachers. Students and teachers, alike, are caught up in innumerable sessions of re-teaching concepts because for days-on-end half the class is somewhere else taking some mandated test. Over-testing has an irrevocably deleterious effect on the instructional program.

Let the Maryland State Department of Education go get the funds to bring in children and test them on as many Saturdays as they wish, but no more instructional time should be sacrificed on the altar of standardized assessments.

Our children do not need to be tested ad nauseum.  Students need every instructional minute that can be squeezed into a calendar.

Teachers do not need the results of “standardized” tests to write a prescription that will improve academic achievement. Educators need to assess learning in the classroom day-to-day , perhaps even a minute-by-minute. That may not be possible when three dozen “clients” are in the room.

Children need to interact with an energetic and committed teacher for more than 1.5 minutes per hour of instructional time. Children need instruction delivered in adequately resourced classrooms with adequate resources without the risk of becoming anonymous souls lost in the crowd. It is high time to return resources to the classroom instead of enriching for-profit educational testing companies.

 

[The original version of this Commentary appeared in the now defunct Prince George’s Journal in late January of 2001.]

To paraphrase the catchphrase from David Simon’s gritty portrayal of a year-in-the-life of a Baltimore detective squad: “The perpetrator is almost always poorly educated.”

Consider for just a moment this tidbit from the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Statistics: “About 41% of inmates in the Nation’s State and Federal prisons and local jails in 1997 and 31% of probationers had not completed high school or its equivalent.”

Compare that to the approximately 18% of the general population that does not graduate from High School and it suggests a strong correlation between the abandonment of educational pursuits and the commission of crimes punishable by incarceration. Only about one-third of those serving time behind bars obtain high school diplomas while imprisoned.

Studies also indicate a strong correlation between low educational attainment and criminal recidivism. This is a by-product of failing to meet the needs of the 1-in-5 socio-economically disadvantaged children that attend our public schools.

California spent $62,000 per prison inmate last year, no doubt much of the spending budgeted for remediation of reading and math skills. How many potential inmates might avoid poor life choices if spending in the public schools exceeded, by just a little, the current $9,600 per pupil on the left coast?

Nationally, we average about $5.00 per inmate for every $1.00 spent on children in school. How has our nation become so penny wise about education and pound foolish about rehabilitation?

Conservatives and Liberals need to unite around the cause of Public Education as the foundation of a sane and rational society. Investing in the welfare of all children and prioritizing education spending would likely decrease expenditures for prisons in the long run.

Might it be more cost effective if we, together, closed the valves in the schools-to-prison pipeline by hiring teachers instead of turnkeys? Our nation seems, instead, to have forsaken the wisdom of Frederick Douglass who wrote a century and half ago, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

Further Reading…

[This Commentary originally appeared in the now defunct Prince George’s Gazette on October 2, 2014.]

Our nation is six decades removed from Brown v. The Topeka Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that ordered school desegregation to proceed with “all deliberate speed” based partially on the logic that separate is inherently unequal.

Nearly a decade later in his “I Have a Dream” speech, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. urged us to contemplate the “fierce urgency of now” and to avoid succumbing to the status quo of “gradualism”.

Those phrases suggest concern that those implementing the desegregation order had chosen the third alternative definitions of the adjective “deliberate,” as in: done or acting in a careful and unhurried way.

At the commemorative event of the 50th anniversary of that great oration, an elderly gentleman carried a placard that said, “50 years later and I’m still protesting this s*#t.”

Half a century later, de facto geographic and economic segregation still exists. True equity has yet to be achieved in the schoolhouse. More than 20% of our children live in poverty and attend schools that are ill-equipped to break the cycle of poverty.

We are forced to wonder where Dr. King would fall in today’s debates about education, but he left us some clues…

On March 14, 1964, Dr. King accepted the John Dewey Award from the United Federation of Teachers and declared, “The richest nation on Earth has never allocated enough resources to build sufficient schools, to compensate adequately its teachers, and to surround them with the prestige our work justifies. We squander funds on highways, on the frenetic pursuit of recreation, on the overabundance of overkill armament, but we pauperize education.”

Can we talk some more, please, about that “fierce urgency of now“.

Further Reading: The Prince George’s Sentinel

[This commentary appeared originally in the now defunct Prince George’s Gazette on January 16, 2014.]

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.” Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Not much has changed since the sixties.

Annually, this nation continues to spend on defense more than the next six most militarized nations, combined. Congress has allocated $1.5 trillion for the F-35, alone. This fighter jet may never be safe to fly and its gunnery may not be fired prior to 2019 while awaiting software fixes, but the merchants-of-death-from-above are doing quite well, thank you!

We could likely end world hunger by allocating $1.5 trillion to that effort.

Which program would generate more good will and likely promote world peace?

In the meantime, too many of our own veterans end up sleeping on vents and under bridges; too many of our families can be bankrupted by one health crisis; too many of our workers toil too hard for too little reward; too many of our children still attend schools that are poorly resourced.

How can this happen in the country that, overall, boasts the “highest” quality of life ever attained?

The answer is simple: too many of the powerful and privileged have chosen personal profit over the public welfare, and we, caught up in our daily struggle to thrive, have allowed acquired wealth to consolidate tremendous political power in the hands of a far too greedy few.

In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos, or Community? Dr. King offered us a different vision when he wrote, “The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement.”

What is the first step toward achieving dignity for all and ending intergenerational inequity? We must ensure the effective education of all our children lest another generation becomes grist for the mill.

 

[This commentary originally appeared in the now defunct Prince George’s Gazette in January 2015. The graphic for “worldwide defense spending” is available on line.]